1. Field of Invention
The present art relates to an online e-commerce and networking system with user joint online purchasing, joint wish fulfillment, user dynamic interaction, and user participatory online advertisements that effectively stimulates more e-commerce activities, adds additional values to users and enables advertisers to better monetize the online communities.
2. Description of Related Art
As reported by the news media, current social networking sites are successful in attracting users to use their social networking services to share information with others, but do not effectively monetize their online communities. Current social networking sites have little or no profit since their inception more than five years ago. These websites generate revenues largely from online advertisements, which receive poor response rates from their users. Only four in 10,000 people click on advertisements on social networking sites, compared with 20 in 10,000 across the web.
The reasons for the low click through rate for social networking sites are that: 1) users are interested in socializing with friends on these sites and they ignore online advertisements; 2) social networking sites do not know how to effectively connect online advertising to users' personal interests; 3) social networking sites attempt to predict users' interests by matching online advertisements to user contributed social contents without knowing what advertisements attract users; and 4) users have no say in the online advertising process and are not interested to click on online advertisements.
In addition, current social networking sites enable users to build relationships only at a surface level by enabling them to share information with others. There are many dimensions for users to build better relationships with others in the real world. However, such factors have not been translated into the online virtual world. Current social networking sites do not help users foster deeper relationships among one another through an online platform system to allow users to help each other for their wide variety of needs.
E-commerce sites, such as eBay and Amazon have much lower reach rates and user memberships than major social networking sites; however, they generate much more revenue than current social networking sites because they directly sell products to consumers online. Users normally visit e-commerce sites when they need to buy something online and not for their social needs; therefore, e-commerce sites are lacking user contributed contents that are related to users' personal lives, such as sharing information, thoughts, photos and videos with others like they can do on social networking sites. This is the key reason why e-commerce sites can't generate the kind of traffic seen on social networking sites.
There is a huge gap between the two types of Internet businesses, which represents a tremendous potential for the future growth of the Internet. If a bridge can be built to seamlessly link social networking sites to e-commerce sites, a win-win situation for end-users and organizations would be realized. There is a need to invent new methods to effectively link social network functions to e-commerce functions.
In addition, although major search engine websites are able to generate huge online traffic and revenue, their online advertising module lacks user interaction, and therefore, they are unable to reach their fullest potential in getting more advertising dollars as evidenced by their low user response rates. There is a need to invent new methods to transform search engine advertisements into user interactive advertisements and to incorporate user-participated online advertisements into search engine websites.
Current online advertisements on the Internet are still at the 1.0 stage whereby advertisements are displayed to end-users in a passive way that are waiting for users to click on them and pop-up advertisements are ignored and un-welcomed by users. Even though Internet companies are trying to target their advertisements to users by matching advertisements to the contents users typed in, they do not really know what user wants and have not thought of methods to link online advertisements to users' personal lives and to make online advertising process user interactive. In other words, current online advertisements have not evolved from their 1.0 display status to 2.0 user interactive online advertisements.
There is a need to invent new methods to transform the current online advertisements into dynamic, user-participated and user controlled online advertisements. Instead of guessing and trying to match advertisements that may interest users, let users tell advertiser what advertisements they want and empower them to play a significant role in the online advertising process.